March 19th, 2012 Last week we learned about the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). CLT dates from the late 1960s. It is a kind of approach on foreign language teaching that focuses on helping students to communicate meaningfully in the target language. The adoption of CLT is an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom language teaching and real-life language use. The goal of CLT is to develop students’ communicative competence.
Here comes a question, i.e. what is communicative competence? Generally speaking, it includes three main components: Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities. Firstly, “Knowledge” refers to the knowledge of language itself, namely, formal knowledge, and functional knowledge. Secondly, “Skills”are assumed to mean the mastery of skills for the formal knowledge and the use of formal language on eyes, ears, mouth and pen, which is the so—called listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. At last but not least, “ability”is concerned with the appropriate use of the language in a certain context. One should know how to use and respond to different types of communicative contexts. What’s more, he or she should have the ability to speak English fluently. From the above, we can come to a conclusion that communicative competence entails knowing not only the language code or the formal knowledge of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation.1
In order to achieve that goal, what teacher should do in real teaching and learning? Since CLT emphasize that language is acquired through communication, so the most basic thing teacher should do is to place students in a real communication context as much as possible. But what kind of contexts can be called real communication context? The real communication context requires for a communicative purpose and a communicative desire. For instance, to have students read and have a conversation that they’ve already know could not be looked upon as communication. (Like these conversations: “What’s your name? My name is Lily; Is this a desk? Yes, it is.”) There must be some kind of information gap that students seek to bridge when they are communicating. The student should feel a real need to communicate.2 For example, to have the students ask each other’s known name could not be regarded as real communication, but we can change it in another way. Let the students choose an English name for themselves without letting others know it. Every student is supposed to hand in a seating chart on which has everyone’s English name. In order to finish this task, students have to ask their classmates and even its spelling. In this way students could not only practice the sentence pattern but also make conversations in an almost real communicative context. This is more effective than just do a mechanical repetition of the sentence pattern without any communicative needs.
Further more, the teacher need to guide learners to solve the problem they’ve meet, to grasp the formal knowledge and functional knowledge, to use language adequately. Teacher should set up many communicative activities for students. And these teaching activities must be interesting and can effectively attract their attention. Only under this condition can students learn English actively.
1王蔷主编. 《英语教学法教程》. 高等教育出版社: 19
2王蔷主编. 《英语教学法教程》. 高等教育出版社: 24